


st. rosa and the swallows, or, "notes on camp"

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: Established Relationship, High School, M/M, Musicals, Tattoos, notes on camp, quotes, susan sontag - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-06-05
Packaged: 2017-12-14 00:33:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[SCRAP] To fulfill a graduation requirement, Stan decides to adapt Sontag's "Notes on Camp" into a musical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	st. rosa and the swallows, or, "notes on camp"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nhaingen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nhaingen/gifts).



> I can't finish this and it pains me. I think I overreached. I can answer questions about plot details in the comments, if you have them! Especially toward the end this is very scrappy and full of gaps where I didn't write in the story, but I have everything straight, so please, just ask! 
> 
> Please also ask about the epigraph attributions, if you are curious -- some of them are from Sontag, but some of them are song lyrics, etc. (Obvious ones.) I was trying to do some kind of ambitious structure that fell apart when I couldn't finish the story, and I was really hoping they'd make sense in context. Still, I'm leaving them because they're good quotes anyway.

St. Rosa and the Swallows, or, Notes on Camp

_in a certain number of acts_

\- - -  

**I.**

_Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist's involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance,_ The Europeans _,_ The Awkward Age,The Wings of the Dove _) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy._

 

~

 

Gradually and yet surely, Stanley Marsh began to style himself as someone — something — projecting an artifice, like a 1970s sitcom set in the 1950s. It began when he was about 9 or 10; perhaps the stress of living in a town of artifice with no indigenous culture of its own had finally gotten to him. But there was that time that he latched onto metrosexual culture, turning himself into someone’s idea of effete, tiny netted shirt and lisping and all. It didn’t hurt that the others were doing it, too. Later still he became a Peruvian pan-flautist, a backyard wrestler, an anti-whaling crusader. There was something lacking in South Park that Stan felt it was important to re-create or rather, create. Often his friends joined; sometimes, they didn’t.

 

By middle school, childlike ennui-fueled dress-up evaporated into more serious pursuits: girls, drugs, breaking rules, breaking rules about drugs and girls. Once Stanley was 13 and he’d made it most of the way with a girl (the lovely Lola, who developed a crush on him sometime around the seventh grade Valentine’s dance), he became jaded.

 

“There is nothing anymore,” he used to moan, lying across Kyle’s bed with his feet on the headboard and his left arm suspended off the mattress. “Every girl in this town is a hot mess and the weather makes my skin crack and the sun is never out and it just _drives me crazy_ , oh my god, _Jesus_.”

 

“You should use lotion,” Kyle replied, tossing a tube to Stan. “As for the girls, well.” He sighed. “ _Well_.”

 

It occurred to Stan that perhaps he should ask more questions, questions about why Kyle had lotion in the top drawer of his nightstand. Grasping the tube, he sat up, and then lay back down in the same position. It was 4:30 p.m. on a Friday in March before the spring-ahead time change, and the sun had slunk behind the mountains to the point that it was dark and getting darker in Kyle’s bedroom. That Kyle’s walls were and always had been a flat, submerging blue didn’t help at all.

 

“It’s just that this town is so stifling,” Stan continued to rant, rolling the tube of lotion against his bare stomach to warm it up.

 

Kyle nodded along. “Mmhmm.”

 

“At the rate I’m going I’ll barely be sane by the time I hit 15. I need to channel it somewhere.”

 

“I know.”

 

“And what is _it_ , anyway? I know I want _it_ , but I can’t define what _it_ is. I just say I’m looking for it but it’s gotten out-of-control, this barely realized piece of myself but can’t escape but doesn’t know where it’s going.”

 

Kyle climbed up onto his own bed, which was currently occupied by Stan. Nestling in between Stan and the wall, feet entwining, Kyle took the lotion from Stan’s hand. Kyle was the last kid in eighth grade to internalize that track pants weren’t acceptable as street clothes. The chilled mesh bunched against Stan’s naked thighs.

 

Kyle pressed his hands against Stan’s stomach; it was warm and his hands were cold and he tensed them slightly against the smooth flesh and pretended he was palpating for surgical reasons. Stan didn’t blink or flinch; Kyle was prone to this weirdness. Kyle arched over and pressed his lips to Stan’s navel and kissed him in a paternal, loving way.

 

Feeling better, Stan dug his fingers into Kyle’s hair. Every three months Kyle’s mother took him to have his hair shorn down and then it quickly grew back into an unmitigated pile of chaos. Then Sheila would become annoyed again and take Kyle back to the salon. Kyle was the first boy in eighth grade to have his hair done by a stylist.

 

“I love you,” Kyle said, like he was just stating another fact: Lotion keeps your skin moist. I don’t want to get my hair cut. Track pants are completely acceptable as clothing. _I love you_.

 

“Oh,” Stan replied. He sat up, finally, and shook the uncertainty away. With the kind of bravado he’d learned from watching film noir with his father and _Gone With the Wind_ with his sister, Stan swept Kyle into his arms and kissed him on the lips. It wasn’t his first kiss, or even his best. But from that moment on he wished it could have been both.

 

~

 

When Stan turned 18, his sister took him to get a tattoo for his birthday. Shelly couldn’t come home until the dreary first weekend in November, but just for Stan’s sake she drove six hours — three from Boulder in the rain and three back in the snow — in her boyfriend’s wood-paneled station wagon. When she arrived, weary from driving and desperately hungry, she discovered she’d left her house key in her boyfriend’s ashtray, for some reason. She had to bang and kick on the door until her father came downstairs in her underwear, and blinked at her.

 

“Where’s Stan?” she asked.

 

“Ugh, I don’t know.” Her father shrugged. “Try the Broflovskis’.” Then he slammed the door in her face.

 

Two weeks after his 18th birthday, Stan found himself sitting in a tattoo parlor in shitty downtown Breckenridge, with his older sister. They’d just gone out for tacos with Kyle, who had decided he didn’t want to participate in any further adventures; they dropped him off at Bebe Stevens’ house en route to Breckenridge even though it wasn’t really on the way. “Thanks for the taco,” he said demurely, before getting out of the car. “I’ll probably still be at Bebe’s by the time you come back if you want to do something.” Kyle wrinkled his nose. “You know, anything you want.”

 

Stan said he’d think about it and send Kyle a text later.

 

“Oh, you are not going to ditch me after I drove here in the fucking rain to fuck that whiny little tool,” Shelly said as she sped away from the Stevens’.

 

“No, it’s cool,” Stan agreed. He was flicking at buttons on the car stereo, trying to find the classic rock. (Shelly’s boyfriend had Boulder presets.) “I’ll see him tomorrow. And, you know. _Fuck_. That’s a stupid word. That’s not something we really _do_. Per _se_. I don’t know if I can describe—”

 

“I like this.” She reached over to muss at Stan’s messy, inky-blue hair, ignoring his bait about the sex. “When’d you do this?”

 

“G _od_ , like last month. I change it a lot, you know that.” Having found the station he wanted, Stan relaxed back into the seat, and sighed. “Kyle hates it.”

 

“Well, why the hell do you care what he thinks, anyway?”

 

Stan rolled his eyes. “That’s a stupid question. He’s my best friend!”

 

“Aren’t you too old for best friends, Stan?”

 

“Okay, he’s my _boyfriend_. It _matters_ what he thinks, because I love him.”

 

“I suppose that is a good thing,” she said. “Even if he _is_ a whiny little tool.”

 

Stan smiled indulgently; he disagreed, but he loved his older sister. More remarkable, though, was that he also _liked_ her. Yes, she was kind of a boor, and yes, she ran away from South Park just in time for their grandfather to start dying, which led to Stan having to take the brunt of his parents’ stress on his own. (At least, this was their father’s assessment of the situation. According to Shelly, it was just going to college, and it was nothing personal.) Many people found her hard to stomach. She had her mother’s modest looks and ample endowments, as well as Sharon Marsh’s practicality and cynicism. But she had also picked up her father’s self-indulgent tendencies, and his brash boisterousness. Shelly always thought she was right — and she usually was.

 

Stan adored this about Shelly. She was a breeze coming off the mountains, or a light in the early winter evenings. Neither delusional nor apathetic — just serious, and indulgent. She encouraged Stan’s creativity; wanted him to push himself. When he failed, Shelly told him. She was harsh, but for a reason. It stung sometimes, but Stan understood. He liked her; he liked that she was difficult. Difficult people were more fun. She was more like Kyle than she realized.

 

Breckenridge Tattoo & Piercing was off Main Street, a squat gray building with chipped concrete facing. Stan shuddered at the rotting leaves clogging the gutters, forcing filthy, nearly frozen water to dribble down the sides of the building. Colorado, he was certain, was where architecture went to die.

 

“This is my brother,” Shelly lisped to the girl at the cash register. “He’s a good kid and he needs a tattoo.” Cash register girl had bleached dreadlocks piled atop her head, and she’d made a momentary face of confusion when Shelly had first spoken. Stan knew that face; it was the _oh, she has a lisp_ face. Shelly talked like she _didn’t_ have a lisp, though, and some boys (Stan knew for a fact) found this a little sexy.

 

(In sixth grade Stan had found a wadded up note on lined yellow paper in the wastepaper basket in the hall. Having wrapped his retainer in a piece of notebook paper before dinner, Stan found himself searching all the household garbage for the errant retainer. It was later found by one Sharon Marsh in the cutlery drawer. The note had read, “Dear Shelley [sic]: Would you go to homecoming dance with me? Before it we can get trashed. And eat pizza. I think youre [sic] lisp is hot even if some people don’t think so. What do you say? Kevin McCormick.”)

 

“What kinda tattoo you want?” the cash register girl asked Stan. “Something small from the book, we charge a flat rate. More than that, it goes up — per hour. Everything’s sterile and I’ve been doing this seven years.”

 

Stan looked around the deserted shop; he looked at the girl at the cash register. She didn’t look a day over 21 — even with the dreadlocks, which made her look unkempt and haggard. For that matter, her shirt was barely more than a paisley napkin, a handkerchief tied at the nape of her neck that fell below the counter, making it impossible to see the end of the fabric. Down her arms were elaborate vines, crawling from her knuckle to her collar bones so realistically that at first, Stan had done a double-take. Her nail polish was chipped, and because it was a very dark blue it looked careless.

 

“You’re the tattoo artist?” Stan asked.

 

She shrugged. “You see anyone else around?”

 

No, Stan didn’t, because else him and his older sister and this tattoo artist with dreadlocks, the shop was empty.

 

While Stan got his tattoo — or tattoos, really — Shelly sat in the corner of the shop reading; she had pulled a dog-eared, coverless copy of _Against Interpretation_ from her bag and out of the pages had fallen a blue highlighter. As the young artist inked thick strokes down the soft, light undersides of Stan’s forearms, Shelly glided the highlighter across what seemed to be every sentence. (Another habit she shared with Kyle. Once Stan had asked Kyle if highlighting _everything_ did not defeat the purpose. “I just find everything important,” Kyle answered. “It’s all good to know,” which seemed to Stan a defense rather than an answer.)

 

When it was over, Stan presented his forearms to his sister, who replaced the highlighter in the book slowly enough for Stan to glimpse the pages glowing in bright, neon blue. Down each arm from the elbow joint ran a line of dashes, culminating on the left wrist in a K and on the right with a B.

 

Shelly frowned, and ran her fingers over Stan’s left pulse point, throbbing with adrenaline and the heat of the needle. All the skin was red and the black ink was stark against it. “This is so stupid,” she told him. “You’re going to have this crap on you forever.”

 

“I know,” was all Stan could offer to satisfy the assertion that he’d royally fucked up something immense and significant.

 

Shelly kept complaining all the way to the cash register. “What a tremendous waste of $100,” she said as she handed the artist five 20-dollar bills, four for the hour of tattoo time and one for a tip. “You are such a tool. Such, such a tool.”

 

In the car on the way back to South Park, Stan tried to talk his sister into changing her mind about the tool level of his new tattoos. “But I think it’s interesting, see.” He pointed to the K on his left wrist. “This is what I wanted. I wanted something important to me, right, and really there’s nothing more important in the world.”

 

“So stupid,” Shelley muttered. She was shaking her head in disgust.

 

“Because I think South Park would have killed me if I didn’t have him,” Stan continued, as if he couldn’t hear her mantra. “I would have — just, just … done something really stupid.”

 

“I find the irony of that statement _insane_. You’re like, 18. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

 

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me.”

 

“ _What_? You just got some boyfriend shit fucking burned on you for _life_ , you stupid tool! I know how shit seems — I mean, you’re young, _really young_ — but that’s just it. One day when you are not dating Kyle and you have his fucking initials and some psycho-emo-drama lines all over your arms someone is going to look at you and ask what the hell it’s about. And you are going to have to say, ‘Well, for my 18th birthday, my hot big sister took me to get a tattoo and I picked some suicide crap and my ex-boyfriend’s initials.’ And people will think you’re a tool. Because you are a tool. A big, _big_ tool.”

 

“Kyle doesn’t think so,” Stan protested.

 

“Um, Stanley? Kyle is like King Tool.”

 

“Maybe so. But I love him, I’ve loved him forever and he’s always been there with me and I’m _in_ love with him, too. And I know that love is naive and everyone makes mistakes and you don’t want those mistakes to be permanent but even if I’m wrong — even if how I feel is wrong and it fades and I — I…” Stan’s voice was beginning to crack. “He’s all I have here, Shell, he is. You left and Dad is fucking crazy and everyone is ridiculous and I can’t do it anymore, he’s the only normal one out of all of them—”

 

While Stan blathered, Shelly coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the two-lane highway, shifting  into park and turning the car off. It was cold in the mountains, rain tapering off into a wet, heavy snow, but as the year drained away it would grow much colder. Years in a mountain town had deadened them to the cold, so long as they were not exposed to it directly, caught un-cosseted in some blizzard. It was only late autumn.

 

“—so I know even if someday he’s not my boyfriend I _won’t_ regret it, because I will _always_ want to remember how this felt.”

 

“Stan.”

 

“What?”

 

Shelly grabbed his hands, which were shaking, finger pads slimy from stroking Vaseline across his forearms where the new tattoos were. “Stop.”

 

“Oh.” Stan sucked the snot out of his nose, and wiped his eyes for effect. “Okay.”

 

“You’re a fucking senior.”

 

“I know.”

 

“You have less than a year left.”

 

“ _I know_.”

 

“So could you please maybe pull your nuts out of your mouth and stop being such a drama queen?”

 

“But that’s just like, how I am.” Stan shook his arms from her grasp, and let his greasy tattoos gleam in the light of the dashboard. “See?”

 

“Oh my god,” she groaned. “You are _such_ a tool.” Twisting the key in the ignition, the station wagon shuddered to life again. “So, we have any ice cream or something back home?”

 

“We have leftover cupcakes Kyle made for my birthday,” Stan offered. “Lemon curd filling. He left them in the shape of a heart on my desk. There were 18, and each with a candle.”

 

“Aren’t those like two weeks old?”

 

“They’re still good. I mean, they’re not rotted or nothing.”

 

Shelly shook her head, wondering when things had gotten so absurd. Back at home, halfway through a stale lemon cupcake, the dog began to bark and her father stumbled into the kitchen. For a moment he locked eyes with her, and then chased her out of the house with a fireplace poker. Stan opened his bedroom window, and let down a fire safety ladder. She left the next morning.

 

**II.**

_Much of the motivation behind Israeli violence, behind a style that is almost a parody of the confidently violent, is undoubtedly meant to overcome the curse of the feminized Jew. I do not mean to suggest that Israeli style is solely motivated by the curse of a stereotype. Given the geopolitical realities of the region, practicality might generate the same type of style. In any event, practical political concerns certainly help justify a style that may have had its roots in a reaction to the humiliations of Jews in the previous millennium in Europe. One might note that Jews in the Diaspora, in the absence of overt threat and without the education in pioneer idealism, have felt no great urgency to develop a hypermasculine style. Quite the contrary._

 

~

 

For three years Kyle had been harboring a plan, definitive and everlasting, destined to make him happy beyond his wildest dreams. Often he spoke to Stanley of his _Plan_ , capital P, all important-like, eyes wide and lips grinning. It contained multiple steps and Kyle was hell-bent on enacting it. He needed Stan’s cooperation, though, to ensure the plan’s success. So far, he had only revealed step one: Go to college in or around Boston.

 

“What’s step two?” Stan had wanted to know. This was in ninth grade. Stan had just bleached his hair and it was grown out to his chin. Kyle thought it was awful and throughout the conversation, kept wanting to tuck Stan’s hair behind his ears for him. It reminded Kyle of hay. He despised it.

 

“Step two is not important,” Kyle assured Stan. “Step one is Boston. Boston Boston Boston. Think Harvard, think Tufts, think BU, BC, Northeastern. I’m trying Brandeis, because my mother’s an alumna. You could try it too. I think 10 schools each is good, and obviously our lists should match. Our life is in my hands, Stanley. Think of me as your fairy godmother.”

 

It so happened that this conversation had taken place in the school library, and Eric Cartman had been two tables over, building a tower out of pudding cups. “Well, Jew, you finally got one identifying detail correct,” he huffed.

 

Butters Stotch had been sitting next to Eric, absorbing the majesty of the pudding-cup structure as if it were the Tower of Babel itself — impossible and insurmountable, and doomed to failure. “What’s that?” he asked, eyes glued to the tower.

 

Eric sighed, pitying his sycophantic observer. “Butters, it seems you did not get the memo. It was difficult to miss, but then, you are a moron. Kyle is gay, and he just called himself a ‘fairy.’ Since ‘fairy’ is typical nomenclature for homosexuals like Kyle, his statement was ironic. See? It’s subtle wordplay, Butters.”

 

“Oh,” Butters replied.

 

Kyle put a cap on his pen and handed it to Stan. He hopped out of his chair, and walked over to Eric. “Say that again,” he growled, grabbing a fistful of Eric’s hair. “I fucking _dare_ you.”

 

“Okay,” Eric croaked. “Kyle, you don’t want to do anything rash. You might break a nail, or the butt plug might fall out of your ass, or—”

 

Before Eric knew it, he had been slammed onto the library floor, with Kyle’s shoe pressing into his face. (A tasseled brown Bottega Veneta loafer — $305 on sale at Neiman’s at Cherry Creek, Kyle had bragged to Token the week before. Token was wearing Adidas Sambas; Token didn’t care.)

 

“If you ever so much as speak one ill word about me again, I will _murder you_ ,” Kyle hissed, “and I’ll make it look like an accident.”

 

Eric shook, and forced the shoe from his face. He rolled out from under Kyle’s crotch, and vowed revenge: “When you least expect it, Jew! I’ll have the last laugh!” But it was three years later, and Kyle had suffered no vengeance of Eric’s. They hadn’t really spoken since, except for cold glances at parties. Stan and Eric maintained a cautious friendship, joking about teachers and sometimes watching football after Sunday afternoon confirmation classes.

 

Kyle, though. Kyle was livid. That same afternoon he flipped Eric Cartman onto the library floor, he marched to the main office to obtain the proper paperwork for the formation of a student organization. Kenny McCormick slouched after him, sucking on a Ring Pop.

 

“What’re you gonna do?” Kenny asked. His lips were tinged with sticky blue.

 

“What I should have done a long time ago,” Kyle seethed, although he had only been in high school for seven weeks at this point. “I’m going to enrage that obese bastard if I have to get the entire school behind me.”

 

“So why’s this the straw that finally broke the camel’s back?” Kenny asked. He hadn’t actually been in the library during the _incident_ , but he had heard second-hand from Craig, who was checking out a copy of _Middlemarch_ at the time. “I mean, he’s said way worse shit before. He’s _done_ way worse shit before.”

 

“It’s the principle, Kenny!” Kyle stamped his foot. The tassels on his loafer bounced. “He can’t just go around actually saying those things about me!”

 

Kenny pulled the Ring Pop from his mouth with an audible smack, and sighed. “You actually _do_ have a butt plug up there right now, don’t you?”

 

The color immediately drained from Kyle’s face.

 

Leaning in, Kenny whispered, “It’s okay. I won’t tell.”

 

Kenny walked away laughing, and the stench of blue raspberry lingered in Kyle’s nose. He pulled a fountain pen from his back pocket, and in thick, watery blue-black letters he scrawled “gay straight alliance” on the dotted line that indicated _club name_. Thus Park County’s first GSA was founded, in the wake of a stupid question asked by Butters Stotch, after a bad pun forced by Eric Cartman.

 

Pretty typical.

 

Kyle’s little club suffered from meager attendance. There was Kyle, of course, and a sophomore girl from North Park who claimed to be bisexual. (The school’s other bisexual girl, Rebecca, whom everyone had called “Red” since time immemorial, did not attend meetings. To be fair, she had only once mentioned her bisexuality, at a New Year’s Eve party. “Well,” Stan had said about 10 minutes afterward, “it must be awfully difficult to make out with a chick when Clyde’s dick is shoved down your throat.” Kyle had agreed. Clyde and Red had broken up by that Valentine’s Day.) There was a gay freshman boy from Middle Park who was very quiet and never spoke. And then there was Butters, who made up the straight contingent of the alliance — along with Butters’ girlfriend, Lola.

 

“And how does this get Cartman back, exactly?” Stan had asked before the first meeting.

 

Tongue-tied, Kyle just fumed. “I’m not going to justify myself until you agree to come to my meeting,” he said.

 

“Well, I’m not going to come to your meeting unless you justify your stupid club.”

 

Kyle stood up, pulled off his shoe (not a Bottega Veneta — a flip-flop this time), and chucked it at Stan’s face.

 

“Hey!” Stan’s raised arms deflected the projectile, but it still landed in his crotch. With a shrug, he tossed it back to Kyle. “Look, I’m not gay, I’m not straight, and I really don’t like allies. Allies are meaningless. You know who had allies?”

 

“Who?” Kyle asked.

 

“Hitler.” Stan crossed his arms.

 

“Oh, well-played.” Kyle slowly clapped his hands.

 

That was three years ago.

 

 

**iii.**

_The first orgasm of the morning is like a fire drill — it’s nice to have a little warning, but not enjoyable. I am too busy to have friends; a lover would just complicate my plans. So I will never look for love again; I’m taking matters into my own hands. I think I could last at least a week without someone to hold me. Won’t you hold me?_

 

~

 

“Those tattoos are stupid.” Kyle was poking at Stan’s scabby flesh, dancing up the veins in Stan’s forearms at lunch on Monday. “I thought you wanted to get a pair of ice skates.”

 

“He told _me_ the sacred heart! Bleeding and everything!” Kenny shouted from across the table. “Ice skating is very severely gay, you know.”

 

“That’s true,” Kyle agreed. He was functioning on little sleep — the result of a lab report he’d finished the night before, paired with an ACT prep class (for a next weekend’s retake — as if a 33 wasn’t high enough) that had prevented him from going over to Stan’s the night before to watch _Mad Men_ and perhaps make out with abandon. Stan felt utterly betrayed by this decision, as it meant that he had been forced to DVR it and hold off on watching. When his sister had e-mailed him her thoughts, he was spoiled and it was all Kyle’s fault. Also, Stan had been bursting to show Kyle his new tattoos and now he regretted going home with his sister instead of going over to Bebe’s after he got back from Breckenridge. _Also_ , he had spent all weekend conceptualizing Kyle’s delighted reaction, jacking off to this periodically through Saturday and Sunday.  But what he had _really_ wanted had been to grab Kyle by the shoulders and lick around his eyes and grind their hips together.

 

Anyway, Kyle’s determination to be forever better than he already was sometimes forced Stan to pretend sex didn’t exist. But of course it did, and at that very moment under their table in the cafeteria, Stan was being reminded of this. Kyle knew exactly which veins to ghost his fingernails down.

 

Stan yanked his arm free. “It’s true, I find the sacred heart wonderfully dramatic as shit. And the skating — I quit that, like, two years ago.”

 

“But that song you wrote—”

 

“I write a lot of songs, Kenny.”

 

Kenny nodded. “Well, that may be so. But who do you think’s gonna sing your gay-ass songs?”

 

“Someone will,” Stan assured him. “You know, someday. Sooner rather than later, I hope.”

 

Kyle laughed at this. “Boyfriend, no one wants to listen to whiny little guitar interludes some kid tracked over GarageBand in his bedroom.”

 

“ _I find your lack of faith disturbing_.”

 

“Oh, don’t quote that shit to _me_ ,” Kyle protested. “I invented quoting that shit.”

 

“That movie is from like 1977,” Stan scoffed. “You did _not_ invent quoting _Star Wars_.”

 

Kyle rolled his eyes so hard they might have fallen out of his face — but they didn’t. “It’s just trite.” This was his new line of defense, having come across it for the first time in an SAT prep book recently. So far in the past week, the following had been labeled by Kyle Broflovski as “trite”: vanilla cupcakes (as opposed to lemon curd-filled cupcakes); leather jackets; quoting from _1984_ or _Catcher in the Rye_ in a Facebook profile; using a picture of an inanimate object instead of yourself in a Facebook profile; calling male nipples ‘tits’; quoting from _Star Wars_.

 

Stan had agreed that quoting Orwell or Salinger was trite. The Facebook thing was just stupid (but then, Stan wasn’t on Facebook, which saddened Kyle because he was forever doomed to be “in a relationship” with no one). To Stan, “suck my tits” was kind of hot, and vanilla cupcakes were maybe uninteresting, but that didn’t make them bad.

 

Anyway, Stan had known what ‘trite’ was for about the past eight years, and wasn’t about to let Kyle forget it. “You have to stop calling things _trite_ ,” he said. “It’s like one of the most popular films of all time. Cliché, maybe. But at this point, calling shit ‘trite’ is a cliché.”

 

At this, Kenny guffawed. “Oh, both of you are fucking cliché as shit. Get over it.”

 

“I’m over it,” Kyle claimed.

 

“Being over it is also cliché,” Stan replied.

 

“Gah! You’re both so fucking — I’m not falling into your language traps, I’m not!” Kenny put on his jacket and gathered garbage onto his tray. “Call me when you want to do something regular people do, like videogames or eat KFC. I’m out of here.”

 

“But we’ll see you at the assembly at 3 p.m., right?”

 

Kenny halted his retreat as Kyle called out to him. He turned around, mouth open, feeling pretty stupid. School was over at 3, and Kenny was happy enough conveniently forgetting about the assembly and going home to smoke, jerk off, and sleep. “Thanks, Broflovski,” he sneered, lowering his eyebrows. “I guess I’ll be there.”

 

Self-satisfaction choked Kyle’s senses.

 

~

 

Park County was not a teeny tiny school; there were about 350 students, which wasn’t a whole lot, but too many to get bored with. Still, sweating it out at 3:07 p.m. in the cramped music room with the other 85 seniors, Stan felt maybe he didn’t know enough of these people. South Park Elementary ran through eighth grade, and wasn’t a big feeder. Until age 13 they had only known about 25 other kids their age. A lot of these people looked familiar in a vague way, like maybe Stan’d been in some algebra class or on the newspaper with them for a semester or something. Maybe if Stan and Kyle hadn’t been dating when they started high school, they would have met some other people. Maybe if Kyle’s club was popular enough to even manage being the butt of jokes, people would at least have known who they were. People always seemed to like Stan a lot more than Stan liked people. Kyle never bothered to approach anyone he didn’t want something from. All things considered, Kyle didn’t want for a lot that could be gotten from the students of Park County High School.

 

Everyone knew what they were in this room for. Gimmick or not, this was the sixth year running that PCHS had forced its seniors to complete a year-long project of any nature, determined at the student’s discretion, pending approval by the student’s advisor. Most kids just wrote an eight-page essay. In fact, the year before, the entire graduating class had submitted essays. The school board felt this looked great on college applications, and gave students something to discuss in interviews. Most PCHS students saw it, at best, as something to be blown off until the very last minute; at worst, as annoying pain in the ass. Some saw it as a bit of each.

 

Stan saw it as an opportunity.

 

The meeting ended (by 4p.m., much to the great annoyance of Kenny, who fled the scene before Kyle could offer him a ride) and 12th graders spilled out into the hallway. Stan and Kyle trudged out into the brisk autumn of late afternoon, wind drying their cheeks and chapping their lips. For this, Kyle applied lip balm to the extent that it was a nervous tick, reflexive and ingrained. The scent of it, in a small pot with a yellow metal lid, was antiseptic, and Stan hated smelling it, and yet loved it as a reminder of Kyle’s presence.

 

With the money he’d made working a weekend and summer job as a sales associate at Banana Republic, Kyle had paid for half of his car, a black 2002 Toyota Camry. He’d quit a week into senior year, though, citing honors classes — the major drawback of Kyle’s precious little type-A personality had always been that at a certain point, his overachieving was overwhelmed by further opportunities to overachieve. He’d saved plenty of money, and his parents saw no reason not too indulge him where possible. Stan, on the other hand, got spending money the usual ways: babysitting, yard work, and siphoning it off of his parents, who weren’t exactly generous. In moments of weakness (read: drunkenness), however, Randy Marsh had been known to dole out $50 bills.

 

As for the car, the gas mileage was rather middling — shameful, if Stan had anything to say about it, at 22 miles to the gallon on the highways — but it worked, which was more than could be said of the car Stan didn’t own. Kyle hated to drive, however, and only owned the thing as a matter of practicality. So he thrust the keys into Stan’s waiting grasp and climbed into the passenger seat, just as the afternoon snowfall was beginning to abate.

 

“Listen,” he said turning on the heater. (Stan was adjusting the mirrors, checking to make sure he didn’t run over anyone as he backed out.) “Don’t get any ideas.” This was the first thing Kyle had said since leaving the meeting.

 

“What ideas?” Stan turned the wipers on; the windshield was covered in snow, but it was light and dusty rather than wet and heavy. It brushed clear away. He turned on the defrosters.

 

“I know that presented with the potential to have free reign of some kind of project, you’ll want to make something of it. But this is serious, boyfriend. Just do the smart thing and write an essay.”

 

“I write essays for classes all the time.”

 

“So what’s one more?”

 

“ _That_ is not interesting.”

 

“You _have_ to graduate high school.” Kyle said this as the car creaked to a standstill at the end of the parking lot driveway.

 

Stan flipped the right-hand turn signal. “Of _course_ I’m going to graduate high school.” He felt it was absurd that this was even a matter of discussion.

 

“If you don’t…” Kyle shook his head. “Look. There is a world out there, a world of untapped potential.”

 

Now Stan was merging. Rush hour traffic was just beginning, cars sailing by at a brisk 40 miles an hour. “Does this world begin and end in Massachusetts, by any chance?”

 

“I have faith in you. You can do anything. But this isn’t a time to do _anything_. Just write the essay. Then we can get out of here. I’m begging you. Seven months and we’re free forever. You can do anything once we get out of here. But _please_ ” — Kyle clasped his hands and shook them in Stan’s general direction — “don’t be fancy.”

 

“Fine,” Stan agreed, flipping on the radio. The static of Kyle’s only preset, National Public Radio, filtered through the car. “ _We’ll see_.” There was no more discussion on the ride home.

 

“I guess that’s slightly better than ‘fuck you,’ ” Kyle figured.

 

~

_from_ _stanley marsh <stan.marsh@gmail.com>_

_to_ _Shelly Marsh <smarsh@gmail.com>  
date            Mon, Nov 5  at 6:13 PM_

_subject_ _this essay._

_mailed-by_ _gmail.com_

 

_What did you do for that year-long project?_

 

~

_from_ _Shelly Marsh <smarsh@gmail.com>_

_to_ _stanley marsh <stan.marsh@gmail.com>  
date            Tues, Nov 6  at 2:19 AM_

_subject_ _Re: this essay._

_mailed-by_ _gmail.com_

_wrote an essay. Doesn’t everyone?? don’t fuck around bro._

 

~

 

Stan had an idea.

 

 

**iv.**

_Ambiguous, contradictory, and existing partly in the eye of the beholder, camp is an especially slippery phenomenon: at once an aesthetic and an attitude, a language and a lens, a manner of behaving and a mode of appreciation. Its early connoisseurs understood it as an acquired taste, often a covert experience, even an oppositional stance in that it suggested a queer way of seeing. … Quintessential camp finds meaning in the margins, elevating the frivolous and rehabilitating the forgotten. And in its purest form, it is thought to be naïve —which is to say, unintentional._

 

~

 

“All the boys are played by girls and all the girls are played by boys. See, because it’s campy as shit and this whole town is like — is like fake as fuck. So I want the people watching to be thinking to themselves, ‘Is this for serious? Is this not for serious? Is he for serious?’ And the answer is, fuck you for even caring.” Stan shifted in the sheets, trying to straighten his legs out. “Okay, I’m done.”

 

“But, boyfriend.” Kyle cleared his throat. His humidifier needed a new filter but his mother had forgotten to buy one at the store. So how his mouth felt all dry and he wished he had some water. “That doesn’t really make any sense.”

 

“Who cares if it makes sense? It has songs people can sing and if I have to waste my time making some convoluted project just so I can get out of this school alive, well…” Stan sighed. “I might as well enjoy it, right?”

 

Kyle wanted to die. He wanted to just crawl into a hole and die. “Not really, no,” he said. Sitting up in bed, he tugged on the covers so they would cover his chest — not because Stan had never seen it (he had been licking it about 15 minutes previous), but because it was cold in the room and dry in the room and his tits were all crinkled up and hard and they were done now, so that was probably awkward. This being Saturday afternoon, Kyle felt he should be studying for _something_ , but he’d finished with standardized testing, gotten his application in to Brandeis for Early Decision I three days ago, folded all his sweaters, and taught his brother to fold sweaters. He deserved this, really. Probably.

 

Stan was still lying down, tracing patterns on Kyle’s back, signing their names over and over because he couldn’t think of anything else. “You don’t sound happy about it. What’s the problem now?”

 

“I asked you not to do anything insane.”

 

“Insanity is _rather_ subjective—”

 

“And I’m worried.”

 

Now Stan sat up too. Kyle had a tiny little twin bed; it wasn’t really big enough for two full-grown boys. They ended up sitting on top of each other, or rather Kyle was now sitting half on Stan’s lap, which neither of them really minded. (Sometimes Kyle wished he could roll over without smashing his face into Stan’s armpits. Stan’s bed was actually a full-size futon, but it hurt Kyle’s back and he didn’t like to sleep on it. Given the pain or the armpits, Kyle picked armpits, every time.)

 

Stan wrapped his arms around Kyle — Stan had nice, lean arms. Even Kyle had to admit that the tattoos didn’t look half-bad. (They were still, however, in Kyle’s opinion, full-stupid.) “You have to trust me,” Stan said, soothing his hands up and down Kyle’s sides. “I’m going to make this work, but you’re going to have to trust me.”

 

“Of course I trust you,” Kyle said, and he did. He trusted Stan to drive his car, which no one else was allowed to do, not even his parents. Just that day, Kyle had trusted Stan to slip one pointer finger, slicked with lotion, into the narrow passage of Kyle’s behind. It was something Kyle liked when he was feeling tense — Stan could read Kyle’s sex noises, tell his frustrated groans from his relieved sighs, knew when to press against what and how to hold back when Kyle wasn’t ready. The conversation they were having was ironic because their entire sexual history, a game they’d been playing on and off for four-odd years, was about trusting one another. It wasn’t that they were avoiding it — it, the big _A_ , intercourse, anal sex — but it was something they never felt fully prepared for. Kyle had developed a habit for butt plugs quite some time ago — he and Kenny often discussed the myriad ways to push boundaries in that regard. But an occasional finger was the most human thing Kyle had ever experienced. When it was inside him he felt excited and impossible, Stan kissing him, their eyes closed, while Kyle stroked their shafts together, weighing Stan’s testicles in his other hand like the unbalanced talion.

 

Then, when they’d both come, and Kyle was drifting to sleep, Stan had said, “I want to tell you about my musical,” and now Kyle was wide awake and terrified, feeling so unsexy he needed to wrap himself in a sheet.

 

“Of course I trust you,” he repeated, trying to convince himself more than anyone. “I just think it would be nice if you’d do the easy thing for once.”

 

“To this day, you’re the smartest _and_ the most narrow-minded person I know,” Stan replied.

 

Kyle’s response to this was to roll onto his side and shove Stan away from him enough that he could grab one of Stan’s wrists, bring it to his lips, and run his tongue up and down Stan’s forearm.

 

“Half-disgusting, half-sexy,” Stan muttered, angling his arm to give Kyle a better shot. “Your refractory period’s not _that_ good, boyfriend.”

 

“If you did have wounds, I would lick those, too.”

 

“Everyone has wounds,” said Stan. “I do. You do. They’re only psychological.”

 

“Can’t you be a psychologist?”

 

“I wouldn’t want to go to graduate school. Unless it’s in art.”

 

“But all art is psychological.”

 

“There’s nothing psychological about what I’m doing.” Stan yanked his arm from Kyle’s grasp, laying back down, grabbing Kyle’s clenched fists in his own.

 

“You’re contradicting yourself,” Kyle said. “I trust you, so much, but you have to believe that what I want is just for us to get out of South Park, go to Boston, and be happy. There are _swan boats_ there. Everything’s a cenotaph. It’s the closest you can get in America to the unspeakably ancient.”

 

“You’re forgetting the Indians—”

 

“Native Americans.”

 

“Is that why you want to move there so badly?”

 

Kyle was quit and still for a bit, feeling his pulse throb into Stan’s fingertips. Then he said, “No. My reasons are just practical. I’m not happy about this play. Musical. I worry for both of us. Someone has to worry.” A great sigh, a genuine one, for the release of actual tension. Kyle’s shoulders had been at his ears; they fell to his chin. “But if you can trust me, I can trust you. It’s better than being married, I should think. Go wash your hands, though. They’ve been up my ass and I don’t trust myself.”

 

Stan laughed, letting go, getting up. He found his T-shirt on the floor (it was green) and pulled it over his head. “You should trust yourself more.” He left to go wash his hands, scrubbing them three times under tepid water, rinsing and repeating.

 

When Stan had crawled back into bed, Kyle was drifting to sleep, but the shaking of the mattress woke him, and he brought two of Stan’s fingers on his nose. “Lavender,” he muttered. “That’s nice.”

 

“You should like that.” Stan kissed Kyle’s earlobe, visible from beneath his messy hair. “It’s your soap.”

 

~

 

Eric Cartman ruled the tech department with imperialistic zeal. He wasn’t creative — or, rather, he wasn’t _that_ kind of creative. He had ideas, big ones, but costume design was well outside of his skill set. He barely knew half of what happened onstage at PCHS.

 

 

~

 

Planning details etc.

 

 

 

~

 

Kenny won the lead, fair and square. This shocked no one. He had a lovely singing voice, a vibrant tenor — but his ace in the hole was his range; he could drop several octaves to a deep growl, if needed. That, or he could hop up to practically an alto. Kenny could not act or dance at all, but Stan reassured him on this point.

 

“The whole thing is really a farce,” he explained. “I don’t care if your acting is stilted or you fall flat on your face. As long as you can sing, they’ll take us seriously.”

 

“I thought we didn’t _want_ to be taken seriously.”

 

“We’ll let the audience figure that out. Leave the conceptual issues to me.”

 

Stan went back to humming a deft little tune from his score in progress, a song about nothing in particular, but he was envisioning loads of staccato contrasted with melisma — like “ _The Messiah_ on crack,” he’d been heard to describe it, although no one really knew what he was talking about, which didn’t particularly bother him at all, really.

 

“Suit yourself,” Kenny replied, slinking off behind the dumpster for a cigarette. He knew it was no good for his voice, but he was hardly going to become a world-renowned opera singer, so what did he care?

 

~

 

The thing Kenny was most looking forward to was the crossdressing.

 

Kenny’s heterosexuality was so pervasive that he had been described once upon a time (two years ago, which seemed like forever) by Eric as a “dyke in a fag’s body,” which was astute and not inaccurate. Kenny himself had no qualms about being the weirdest person in their class — a superlative he had earned fair and square throughout the course of his eleventh-grade relationship with Bebe Stevens. (Come June this would be canonized forever in the yearbook.) During their year-long affair, Kenny had made no secret of his fondness for her assets; she wore a DD-cup proudly, sashaying down the halls, confident in four-inch ankle boots. What she had liked about Kenny was anyone’s guess, although by April the entire school was aware of Kenny’s fondest wish — to be fucked, aggressively and with abandon, by Bebe, using a lifelike olive-colored strap-on dildo he had purchased during a late-night excursion to Fantasy 21, a seedy sex shop on the side of Route 285. Often Kyle accompanied him on these excursions.

 

(On a related note: On the occasion of the most recent Halloween, Kyle had dressed up as an amateur psychologist, a costume that was in part composed of fake spectacles, sweater vest [Banana Republic’s finest merino wool, in an autumnal argyle pattern], and pipe; in part, Kyle cloaked himself in this role by floating around the party in Clyde’s basement issuing diagnoses to anyone who would stop to listen. Some of these were a bit too on-the-nose. To Kenny, he’d said, “The fact that you grew up deprived of so much just forces you to indulge to excess, be that in regard to sex or drink or what-have-you.”

 

“Well, no shit,” Kenny had slurred in response, sloshing a cup of Jaeger all over his ‘costume,’ a pair of briefs and his chest spray-painted silver. He was a naked robot, not that at this point it mattered, or that at any point it had been obvious or well-articulated. Kenny had just grinned madly, put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder, and said, “Don’t tell me there’s nothing orally fixated about you and that pipe, Kyle,” to which Kyle could only blush.

 

Kyle spent the remainder of the party prefacing his diagnoses with the reassurance that the costume had been Stan’s idea.)

 

So insistent on the matter of the strap-on fucking was Kenny that he found himself dumped, a week after prom junior year, by Bebe, who called him (in the three-page note she’d left in his locker) ”sick” and “in need of someone, probably a boyfriend, who is willing to indulge this fucked-up fantasy,” because “I am not in possession of a dick, Kenny, I’m _really not_.” (Underlined three times.) To Kyle, Kenny had moaned, “But all I wanted was to suck on her tits while she did it, man,” which both of them agreed was a heterosexual ideal.

 

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong or inherently gay about cock, necessarily,” Kenny figured. “I have one. It’s exhilarating. Nothing turns me on less than another guy, though. Just facts.”

 

Stan was forced to listen to these musings as he fitted Kenny for a costume, a kind of short kimono over a tuft of petticoat, which together formed a kind of oriental tutu. There was nothing balletic about Kenny’s part, but the costume department had outfitted the cast when PCHS had done _The Mikado_ about eight years ago, leaving behind many pan-Asian relics, rice-paper fans and block-platform shoes, and so on. Stan resolved to create the most garish thing he could, and in fact he had been up until 4 a.m. just the previous night dyeing petticoats to clash with paired kimonos.

 

Kenny had to admit, it didn’t look half bad. “I should say I’m rather impressed, Marsh,” he muttered, knocking his knees together in front of the mirror. Kenny was tall and sinewy, built like a piece of taffy stretched too far to look edible. “I think I look ridiculous.”

 

“Good.” Stan tucked leftover pins back into his pocket, not before clasping them shut. “I think you look really good, actually.”

 

“You think I’m attractive?” Kenny asked.

 

Stan shrugged. “You’re very charismatic.”

 

“But, _attractive_ , do you find me attractive?”

 

“In some respect, yeah, but I don’t want to do you or nothing.” Stan ran his fingers through his hair, sweeping it from his face. In the madness of planning his musical, he hadn’t done anything with it lately. It was an affront to his personal standards, and was now prone to interfering with his ability to see. But all things considered, Stan’s hair was less of a problem than the fact that maybe Kenny was coming on to him. “Are you coming on to me?”

  
“What?” Kenny sat down, pulling a pack of cigarettes from the elastic band on one of his knee-high stockings. He did not tap the package against his palm so much as smash it into the ground. “Fuck no. I’m just wondering.”

 

“Well, why, Kenny?”

 

His throat burning, Kenny replied, “Everyone likes to be liked.”

 

Stan sat next to him. “Not everyone. Kyle doesn’t want to be liked.”

 

“Bullshit. Phooey. Kyle wants to be liked _the most_.”

 

“I mean, I like him the most — no offense.”

 

“Cigarette?”

 

Stan watched Kenny’s neck strain and his chest deepen on an inhale, thin, chapped lips tightening.

 

“Um.” Stan shook his head. “No thanks.”

 

“I don’t know why people always think I know shit.” Kenny leaned over to spit off the stage. “Everyone likes to be liked. You do. I do. Do you know this? I’m _desperately_ lonely. You guys are always together. Who the fuck do I have?”

 

“Um, not _always_. I don’t know. Cartman?”

 

Kenny doubled over laughing, hugging  his knees as they dangled over the stage, holding his cigarette aloft so ash would drop into his hair — not that it seemed Kenny noticed or cared.  When he came up, gasping, he said, “Oh, god, _Cartman_. That’s hilarious. Yeah, in a way, it’s like having _three_ friends. You know? Because he’s fat.”

 

“I got it.”

 

“Nobody, like, ever taught me to do anything. School fucking sucks.”

 

“How’s your essay coming?”

 

“What essay? … You should see the look on your face. I’m not writing a fucking essay. I’m getting my credit for being in your play.”

 

“It’s a musical. Is anyone writing an essay?”

 

“Yeah, your boy is. He’s been checking shit out from the library like he doesn’t have to bring anything. Now, speaking as someone who’s been underneath a tipped shelf of library books, I think that’s _crazy_.”

 

“Kenny, shut the fuck up for a moment.”

 

 

 

 

**Tktk.**

_Tktktk._

 

~

 

“It’s gone too far!” Kyle marched into Stan’s bedroom shouting this, furious with hair unkempt, which was something Kyle never allowed out in public. The manufacture of his daily appearance was an involved process, involving a blow dryer and six types of product — he didn’t want it _straightened_ , per se, just relaxed enough that it framed his face in a controlled way, waves of amber forming brief bobs around his ears and cheekbones.

 

But there was none of that this morning, as Kyle used his key to get into the Marshes’ house at 8 a.m., before he knew Stan’s family would have been at church. The consequence of this was the ungodly mess of Kyle’s hair in its unkempt state, twisted fillets of hair tangled up together in what seemed like one giant knot. From where Stan lay in bed, it seemed more like a bouffant, at least in shape, but haphazard and so unintentional. It was like a nest, and Stan wanted to lose his fingers in it.

 

“Good morning,” he said, sitting up against the headboard of his bed, wishing he had been wearing a shirt. “Can you, um, toss me a shirt?”

 

Kyle softened, untensing his fingers and letting his posture slack. “Sure. From where—”

 

“If there isn’t one on the floor, bottom drawer, like always.”

 

“Well.” Kyle shuffled over to the dresser, trying to keep his eyes focused on Stan at all times. “I’m not going to be your bitch and pick dirty clothes up off the floor.” He tossed Stan a long-sleeved red T-shirt, the kind Stan wore to bed when it was really cold out, and he wasn’t with Kyle, just shuddering in his bedroom alone at night. Since it was late April now, there was really no need. The weather they experienced in childhood — “winter, and July,” almost literally — never seemed to occur anymore, with the snow storms ending by late March at least, and the temperatures beginning to climb into the 50s and 60s for what could optimistically be called ‘high spring.’ (Whether this was the result of long childhood memories, or climate change, no one really knew. Although perhaps Stan’s father knew — but Stan didn’t want to speak with him about the weather.)

 

“I’m also not wearing underwear,” Stan said, blinking his eyes with flirtatious rapidity.

 

Kyle just scowled and sat on the bed. “I fear this operetta of yours has taken a turn for the ridiculous,” he said, in what sounded to Stan to be a flawless recitation of something Kyle must have been up all night rehearsing, probably while he was washing (and not blow drying) his hair.

 

“Oh, you realize that, do you?” Stan rolled his eyes, trying to pull Kyle closer to him, more into bed. Kyle was wearing lots of clothing — “Too much clothing,” Stan said, trying to yank Kyle’s shirt up.

 

Kyle’s belly was flat and warm; he carried his extra weight in his thighs and his arms. “I’m not here to — _mmmmmmmmff_ — fuck _you_ , Stan, I’m not here to fool around.”

 

“Well, you’re waking me up.” Stan shifted his hips toward Kyle’s, grinding a nascent erection into something really persistent. “You must understand.”

 

“I don’t understand!” Kyle pulled his shirt down, clambered off of Stan, and sat at the foot of the futon, arms and legs crossed. “Kenny tells me you’re putting him in _drag_ , Stan.”

 

“I am. So?”

 

“So?”

 

“All the boys are in drag. All the _girls_ are in drag. It’s a drag show. Literally. Boyfriend, What’s wrong?”

 

Kyle trembled, hands clenching Stan’s thick upper-arms, chin tucked into Stan’s chest, hair fraught. “Put me down!”

 

“Fine.”

 

Gingerly, Kyle regained his balance, brushing abstract lint from his thighs and arms. “I’m not going to fuck you! Not now, not ever!”

 

“Not … ever?”

 

“Maybe sometime.” Kyle sat on the bed, arms crossed, one leg bent over the other knee. It made Stan smile. Men weren’t supposed to sit like that, but Kyle was too careful to let his legs splay open — to reluctant to expose himself. “I’m so worried. You haven’t told me anything about college. All you care about is this stupid play—”

 

“It’s a musical.”

 

“—so I wonder, did you even _apply_ to college? Is this all some stupid joke to you? Life is not a joke! You have to go to college! Stanley, there are things that I want, just as much as you want them, but I worry. Like, right now I’m seriously worried you’re not going to college.”

 

Any arousal of Stan’s was now snuffed out beyond revival. He wanted to touch Kyle — not sexually, but to make him feel better. Kyle was so sad, sitting there — his hair messed up, his skinny legs crossed with an effeminate toe pointing toward the carpet. Stan felt he should stroke Kyle’s thigh, tell him he didn’t have to tense his calf like that — but for the first time in memory, Stan was not sure he was allowed to _touch_ Kyle.

 

So he just rolled his eyes and said, “Of course I applied to college.”

 

This didn’t appease Kyle. “Well, then where are you going?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Where did you _apply_ to?”

 

“Christ, you _know_ where I applied to, you read _all_ my applications—”

 

“Then why aren’t you going anywhere! Why don’t you have any decisions?”

 

“I don’t know!”

 

“I’m not fucking retarded! I know when colleges send out decisions!”

 

“Look, just because you got into college in like December—”

 

“This isn’t about me! This is about you.”

 

Stan snapped, “Bullshit! Of course this is about you! It’s about you, it’s always about you! You don’t care where I’m going to fucking college! You haven’t asked me anything about where I want to go or what I want to study! You just keep telling me to go to college in Boston! Well, fuck that! What if I don’t like Boston? What if I don’t like _college_? Did you think about that? Maybe I don’t want to go to college!”

 

Kyle’s anger was now significantly diminished. Now his eyes were wide and his hands were trembling. “You have to!”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because it’s what people do—”

 

“Why? Because it’s what _you_ want me to do?”

 

“No, because you’re—you need to—”

 

“I need to _what_ , I need to do what you say all the fucking time?”

 

“Because you’re never going to be able to support me if you don’t get a good job!” Kyle covered his mouth with his hands. “I can’t believe I said that,” he muttered.

 

Stan heard him perfectly loud and clear. “Oh,” Stan said, posture slumping. “Well, yeah. No shit.”

 

“I didn’t mean it like that, I didn’t mean it like a _bad thing_ —”

 

“Why do you assume I think it’s a bad thing?” Stan shook his head. He laughed. “Oh, never mind. That’s a horrible, horrible thing. Who the fuck _are_ you?”

 

“Are you angry?”

 

“Am I angry that you’re acting like an entitled psycho bitch? Very much, yes.”

 

“Stan, I didn’t mean—”

 

“Yes, you did. You might be the most self-involved person I have ever met—”

 

“Eric Cartman?”

 

“No, Kyle, you! _You might be the most self-involved person I have ever met,_ but.” Stan took a deep breath: “You don’t say things you don’t mean. Brutally honest, even!”

 

“Boyfriend—”

 

“Don’t fucking ‘boyfriend’ me! Why can’t you just stand with me when I want to do something?”

 

“I do, you know I do! But there’s a time to take stances, and there’s a time to just get things done, and for fuck’s sake, don’t you think now is the latter?”

 

“Dude,” said Stan. “Is this us having a fight?”

 

Kyle thought for a moment. “Yes,” he hissed. “This is us. Fighting.”

 

“Right.” Stan crossed his arms. “Well, I think you’d better go.”

 

“No! We should resolve this — I want to stay and resolve this.”

 

Stan openly laughed. “What do you think we’re going to resolve here?” He nodded at Kyle, and then he nodded at himself. “You want me to call off my play, and I’ve got a boner the size of Montana and I want to fuck you. And it seems neither of us is willing to budge! So that’s handy. And speaking of handies, unless you want to put out, _I think you should go_. And don’t you ever think of coming into my room on a Saturday morning and getting in bed with me and then _lecturing_ me about what I ought to do. Fuck you.”

 

Instead of budging, Kyle said, “You want to fuck me?”

 

“Honestly, I don’t care which of us fucks the other,” Stan confessed. “Why, does that make

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

“Where’s Kyle?”

 

Kenny looked up from his script. “Good morning.”

 

“Yeah, fucking super morning. Where’s Kyle?”

 

Kenny cleared his throat. “How the fuck would I know where Kyle is?”

 

“He’s too predictable,” Stan said. “I know him better than he knows himself, and he knows I know him better than he knows himself. So I know he’s not just hiding from me—he wants to be found. And obviously, he’d tell you, so I could go find him. So, seriously, Kenny — where’s Kyle?”

 

Kenny shut the black three-ring binder with his script in it, laying it down in front of him on the stage. “He wants you to answer a series of riddles. Then I can tell you.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yeah, actually. Really.”

 

~

 

 

“I just wanted to tell you that I got into Emerson.” Stan paused as Kyle’s eyes lit up. “It’s the only school I didn’t get rejected from. They’re giving me a little money, but not like a shitload or anything, so I’m going to go balls-deep into debt now. So see you in Boston this fall, maybe. Or maybe not. If so, that’s awesome, and I love you. And if not, go fuck yourself.”

 

Stan sniffed, and turned, and walked away.  Kyle was left sitting alone on the floor of the library, hugging a copy of _tktktk_ and shaking.

 

 

~

 

  _Kyle Broflovski_

_Park_ _County High School_

_Grade 12 - Cumulative essay_

_May 20XX_

_For my final essay of high school, I have chosen to write about a personal topic. People — my friends, my boyfriend, even my parents — have often accused me of being too serious. Teachers, too. That my life is so academic I can’t possibly feel. That I’m what they call a ‘type-A personality,’ that I make decisions on carefully calculated risk assessments rather than my own personal needs, wants, desires. I have been this way as far back as I can remember. In grade school, even, I actually enjoyed my classes. I liked doing homework. I liked learning. I was always happy to go to school in the morning. I was not a procrastinator. People who know me see me as a perfectionist. At most times, though, I feel that my life is far from perfect, that I may never achieve the things I really want. I have therefore decided to use these eight pages to expound on this idea, to write about who I believe I am besides a type-A personality. This is enormously difficult for me. I have had to produce several revisions to this paper when I felt it was reading too insincerely or stiffly. I want to use this opportunity to prove that I am not a robot, I am a person, and like all people I feel great pain and volatile emotions, such as embarrassment, insecurity, passion, and contentment. The source of these emotions is my boyfriend, Stanley._

_Stan is also 18 and a senior in high school. People have accused us, historically, of being much too similar — that there is hardly any difference between us. That is not true. Stan is emotionally fluid, but much more rational than I. He is intelligent, but his genius is creative. He has wild ideas that seem impossible to put into practice, but he often somehow manages. As a boy of perhaps about 10, I began to feel that I was probably sexually attracted to other boys; subsequently I became painfully aware of my movements, my posture, the tone of my voice. I tried to do boyish things, to wear clothes and use tones and gestures that would not communicate any information about my sexual inclinations, or really anything about my personality. I was not afraid of it being known that I was gay; I told my parents on my thirteenth birthday, and they were shocked (to my surprise) but supportive. I was far more afraid that people would think they could know me, could make assumptions about me, based on these actions. Stan has never had these fears, these problems. He has never come out or said the words “I am gay” to anyone. He is not in hiding; it’s his feeling that people will know him without these disclosures. He doesn’t accept the terminology of gay and straight, thinking of himself as bisexual with a primary learning toward males. But he would never use these terms, he would say something like “I’m sexually open but mostly androsexual,” which is a way of saying he prefers men. I write so much about this because it underscores the fundamental difference in our approaches to self-definition._

_Here is another example: Stan is agnostic; he believes in spiritual forces that he can’t comprehend, but not in the idea of Judeo-Christian gods. He is not traditional in any sense and I don’t think he would object to concepts like open relationships or a long-distance relationship when we each go to college next fall. On the other hand, I am a Conservative Jew. (“Conservative” here being a movement in Judaism, rather than a political leaning; politically I am socially liberal, perhaps Libertarian, although I’ve not been able to vote having turned 18 this month so perhaps it’s irrelevant.) It is very important to me to have a traditional household and family structure. I have spent several years trying to determine how I could effect this in my own life despite the fact that I am gay and in a relationship with another man. I conducted a scientific study of places in America where two men could have as heteronormative a life as possible, assigning numerical weights to individual factors (such as legalization of gay marriage, educational and job opportunities, adoption law, etc.), coming to the conclusion that the best city for us to live in would be Boston, Massachusetts._

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

**Tktk.**

_This is our decision to live fast and die young. We’ve got the vision – now let’s have some fun. Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do — get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute? Forget about our mothers and our friends — we’re fated to pretend. I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms. I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world. I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home. Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone. But there is really nothing, nothing we can do. Love must be forgotten; life can always start anew._

 

~

 

Stan sat on the catwalk, surveying his sets from on high, legs dangling over the scuffed wood and painter’s tape marking out choreography cues. A lot had been accomplished, but there was much yet to do. As it was a Friday evening, Stan’s cast had mostly gone home, for dinner or to get an early start on the weekend. It was only 5 p.m., but the school felt deserted. Cartman had stayed behind to find Stan some blue gels in the bowels of the school’s basement storage lockers, with the unspoken understanding that later in the evening, Stan would play designated driver. It didn’t seem like a fun evening at all, but if Kyle was going to act like a bitch, what else was there to do? Sulk, wait for his gels, tape them to the lights, climb back down to earth. It was nice up there, Stan figured. No one to bother him.

 

Of course, that was when Kyle showed up to bother him.

 

“ _Boyfriend_.”

 

“Oh, hey.” He spun to face Kyle, tucking his legs underneath him. “What’s up?”

 

Kyle had never climbed up to the catwalk before. For a moment Stan wondered if he should maybe give him a hand. But Kyle was almost at the top anyhow, so Stan simply admired the way Kyle’s shirt rode up while he climbed.

 

“My god,” Kyle breathed, hoisting himself off the ladder and onto the platform. “It’s _scary_ up here.”

 

“Yeah.” Stan shrugged. “I don’t know. I dig it.”

 

“What are you doing up here?” Kyle shook his hair from his eyes, and pulled his shirt back down. He caught Stan’s glance. “I’m getting it done next week. My hair, I mean. Stop _looking_ at me.”

 

“I’m not looking at your hair. _Here_.” Stan extended a hand, which Kyle took, inching away from the ladder and more toward the center of the platform. “It’s safe. I’ve got you.”

 

“It’s fucking scary up here!” Kyle repeated. He grabbed  for a rope hanging from a nearby rafter. “What are you _doing_ up here?”

 

“I was supposed to be putting some gels on the lights,” Stan said. “Blue ones. But, you know, no gels up here.”

 

“So, what, you’re just sitting 30 feet above the stage all alone?”

 

“I guess so.” A smile tugged at the corners of Stan’s mouth. “Not alone anymore, though, am I?”

 

Kyle snorted. “You’d better hope I don’t fall off this thing. Then you’ll be alone for a while.”

 

“Oh, don’t be dramatic. Kenny’s fallen off this thing lots of times; hasn’t killed him yet.”

 

“Oh yeah?” Kyle asked. “What’s he been doing up here?”

 

Now Stan was grinning. “What do you think?”

 

“Well, I know he’s an accomplished lighting technician,” Kyle figured. “That or smoking. That or fucking. If I fall off this thing I’ll kill you, you know.”

 

“How’re you going to kill me if you’re dead?”

 

Kyle nodded. “Good point.” He shrugged, letting go of the rope and inching closer to Stan.  “I, um.” He blushed. “I came to find you for a reason.”

 

Stan had been grinning, but now his face fell — the realization that maybe, just maybe, all of his worst fears would be realized on top of the auditorium catwalk, three storeys above solid ground, inside the high school. “You _can’t_ dump me on a rafter,” he said. “I don’t want this, I really—”

 

“Shut up.” Kyle clapped a hand over his own mouth. Then he removed it. “Oh god, boyfriend — Stan. I’m not going to dump you. How could you think that?”

 

“We fought—”

 

“We fight _a lot_ —”

 

“—but bad this time—”

 

“Couples will fight, you know, it’s actually _to be expected_ —”

 

“We never fight like _that_ , though. You _slapped_ me.”

 

Kyle’s eyes widened. There was something in his pocket and it was pressed between the boards below him and the flesh of his behind and he wanted to pull it out but he knew, _not yet_. Stan was terrified — he was actually sweating a little. “You — oh, god, _boyfriend_ , dude, you actually think I would _dump_ you?”

 

Stan nodded, slowly, grimacing. “You’re amazing.” He sighed. “You don’t need me.”

 

“How could you _say_ that?”

 

“People like you don’t come along all the time. People with good souls and great teeth and perfect posture _and_ a big, juicy brain — they do _not_ come from South Park.”

 

“You think my brain is juicy?” Kyle asked. “I _think_ that’s flattering.”

 

“I definitely meant it in a _good_ way. But you — all the things you told me you wanted. I can’t give you any of that. You deserve the biggest house and most beautiful children and the words _summa cum laude_ stamped on your ass. You’re my best friend in the word; you always have been. And I love you _dearly_. More than I love anyone or anything. And I want to be with you forever. But I don’t know how I could do that, _and_ make you not-miserable.”

 

“Oh, Stan.” Kyle cocked his head, and sighed. “You make me the most miserable when you talk like this.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be sorry. Those things — the things I want—they’re meaningless without you, boyfriend. _Stanley_.” Kyle lunged toward him, wrapping both arms around his shoulders. “I know I’m a terrible boyfriend,” he said against the hair at the base of Stan’s neck. “I never give you what you need. But I like to think we need the same things. Do you know?”

 

“Kind of,” Stan said. “You mean sex, right?”

 

Kyle giggled. Then he covered his mouth with both of his hands. Then he said, “Well, yes. But I also meant spending time together and getting out of this town and, you know, couple things. And I haven’t done any of that for you.”

 

“Well, I never went to any of your meetings.”

 

“Oh, about _that_.” Kyle let go of Stan and balanced on his haunches. “I don’t really give a shit. I started doing that for my college applications. I mean, I do everything for college applications, really, but — yeah, I don’t give a crap about the GSA. I started it to build my resume or whatever.”

 

“When you were a _freshman_?”

 

“I told you. _I have a plan_.”

 

“What about Cartman?” Stan asked.

 

“Well, I had been _planning_ on doing it. I just figured if I did it _right then_ , it would have some good dramatic impact. And _anyway_ , that fucking club is a joke. No one ever comes.”

 

“I should have come.”

 

“Probably,” Kyle agreed. “But regrets don’t do us any good right now.”

 

“That sounds very wise.”

 

“ _I’m_ very wise! You should do everything I say from now on.”

 

Stan chuckled. Sitting across from him was the most beautiful boy he’d ever seen. They were floating 30 feet off the ground looking down on the stage on which two weeks from that night, _his_ play would premiere. Fears assuaged, he felt pretty good about life. “So you just came all the way up here just to tell me we’re not breaking up.”

 

“Not really, no. Well, I’ve been feeling kind of, um … _priapic_ lately.”

 

“I don’t think that words means what you think it means,” Stan replied. “And it’s definitely _not_ an SAT word.”

 

“It means _exactly_ what I think it means.” Kyle reached into his back pocket, producing his little pot of lip balm. “And I really mean it.”

 

Stan burst into a grin. “Okay, let’s go home.”

 

“No, let’s let the moment consume us, up here on this scary platform.” Kyle gestured around himself in a grand sweep of his arm, palm open. “It’s kind of a rush, right?”

 

“Not really an original idea,” Stan muttered.

 

“Right, because fucking’s such an original idea. I thought of it, actually. When I was climbing up the ladder.”

 

Stan sighed. He was pretty excited and suddenly he felt himself becoming aroused. Lunging forward, he grabbed Kyle by the shoulders and kissed him, slow and deep, their tongues pushing up against each other. Kyle shifted around a bit while Stan held him, trying to unzip both of their pants and maintain any kind of rhythm. Once Stan got started it was difficult to halt his progress, but Kyle felt like he needed some control this time. So he pushed Stan away by the shoulders, slipping his briefs down so they rested at the cleft between his ass and his thighs.

 

“Lie back,” Kyle instructed, nudging Stan at the hip. “On your back. That’s it.”

 

Stan tried to see Kyle, but he spied only the auditorium ceiling. He felt the catwalk creaking under a gentle sway, trembling and groaning. It mirrored how Stan felt himself in that moment, as Kyle coated his clean, pale hands with lip balm and then wrapped them around Stan’s dick, teasing back skin so that everything was ready. Assuming Kyle was going to hump him to completion, Stan shut his eyes and draped an arm over his face, wondering when it was going to begin. Then he received the abrupt shock of his life as Kyle sat upon his dick, ever so slowly letting it disappear inside a place Stan had never properly been to, and yet was quite acquainted with.

 

Stan’s eyes flew open, only to sight Kyle biting his lip, steadying himself to the platform with both hands, eyes rolled back in his head. Stan could see and feel that he was only an inch of two in, but already the squeeze of Kyle against him made Stan want to bolt up and thrust. Instead, he took a deep breath and asked, “What are you doing?”

 

“Getting fucked,” Kyle said, the raggedness of his words betraying his own sense of trepidation. “Don’t you like it?”

 

“I love it,” Stan groaned. “God, Kyle, you — oh god, _fuck_.” He shut his eyes again, felt Kyle wriggling around.

 

“How’s it feel?” Kyle asked. He was still making awkward sex faces, jutting his tongue out in weird places and breathing too deeply.

 

“Tight,” Stan answered. He was exerting a lot of energy just trying to keep himself from slamming his hips up and into Kyle, bruising both of their pelvic bones. “Really good. You — um, what about you?”

 

“Not bad,” Kyle said. His breath was short, so he tried to spit things out in clipped syllables: “Need practice. But I like it. Good. In a weird way. Weird but good.”

 

“Oh, good. Why—” Suddenly, Stan felt Kyle slip all the way down, until he was buried to the hilt.

 

Kyle took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and moaned. “Could get used to this,” he said. “I like it.” Opening his eyes, he made a point of locking gazes with Stan. “ _Fuck me_.”

 

“You’re kinda riding me,” Stan replied. “I think you have to figure out a way to fuck your — oh, _Jesus_. Take your shirt off.”

 

Kyle looked around, and figured it couldn’t hurt to go ahead and lose his top, so he peeled it off and tossed it behind himself, hoping it didn’t fall three storeys down. Straddling Stan’s waist with his knees wasn’t exactly a new position, and he’d had plenty of things inside before. But the feeling of everything adjusting, of their bodies learning how to fit together all over again — Kyle was overcome with romanticism, like he’d finally found everything he’d ever been looking for. Everything felt good inside, in literal and figurative ways. It took Stan reaching up to grab his cock for Kyle to even realize that somewhere in between climbing up to the catwalk and climbing on top of Stan, his erection had wilted a bit.

 

“Not into it?” Stan asked. “Because we can stop, but,” deep breath, “I _am_ going to need to come, like — please move, okay? I want to see you move.”

 

“Like this?” Kyle brought his hips up and then rocked backward and down, all in one fluid movement. “I’m _really_ into this. It just happened.” He kept moving, trying to read Stan’s face and match up what he was doing with different reactions, kept reminding himself to think, think, think — but he couldn’t. He just wanted to get Stan in deeper, even as he was certain Stan was in as deep as possible. It was a weird feeling, being touched in all these different places at once. He liked it, in particular because as he was trying to writhe around into the perfect position, it occurred to Kyle that this was something like a skill, something he could build on, get better at. But then Stan groaned and he stopped thinking again and grabbed Stan’s hands and sighed. Kyle wondered if the faces he was making were as stupid as Stan’s were. Probably.

 

At this point, Kyle didn’t care if he climaxed. He just wanted to feel this full and stupid and happy forever. Perhaps he should have felt worse about being too analytical about his real, honest-to-god first time. But Stan’s enjoyment was obvious, both of them sweating and smiling and just kind of fucking in a stilted, indulgent way. It was glorious, Kyle felt. It was glorious, and—

 

“Hey, fag! You left your tape on the stage.”

 

Cartman had returned.

 

Stan stopped moving. “Crap,” he whispered. “ _Crap_.” He felt Kyle’s legs tense around him. Hands grasped his shoulders tighter.

 

Kyle shut his eyes. “Oh my god,” he said. “ _Get off me_.”

 

“I can’t, with you on top of me!”

 

“Jesus Christ, _oh my god_ ,” Kyle repeated. “Fuck me, just fuck me—”

 

Stan had to restrain himself from making any kind of smarmy comment. “Get off me, boyfriend. I can’t move—” He was going to say, _if you’re trapping me_. But it was too late anyhow.

 

“Holy _shit_.” Eric Cartman had reached the top of the platform.

 

~

_from_ _stanley marsh <stan.marsh@gmail.com>_

_to_ _Shelly Marsh <smarsh@gmail.com>  
date            Fri, May 6  at 6:08 PM_

_subject_ _so. er._

_mailed-by_ _gmail.com_

 

_Oh Shelly Shelly Shelly,_

_Just lost my virginity. (Yes really.) 20 minutes later got kicked out of high school. This is true. Direct correlation, actually, in that Cartman ratted us out. (Us being me and Ky, naturally, in case you were wondering And yes, we did it at school, which I suppose in retrospect was a foolish idea but I was seduced and this is not my fault. When the moment finds you—when you find the moment—and I thought the school was absolutely deserted.)_

_No one seems livid but don’t buy any tickets to Boston yet because I may be grounded in Colorado for some time. Not sure. Play is definitely off so don’t drive back or anything._

_Secretly I am terrified but I think I should hold it together for a while._

_Help me._

~

 

Since they’d been kicked out of school for copulating together, their mothers decided it was only fair that they all sit down to discuss it together — Stan and Kyle, and their respective sets of parents. They met at 6 p.m. at Café Monet, South Park’s first — and, still, only — French restaurant. Randy was going to have to join them later; he’d driven out to survey a site north of Steamboat Springs that morning, and was still in the car, but expected shortly. His wife hadn’t told him exactly what had happened — only that Stan had been expelled, and that there was a misunderstanding. She felt this was for the best. He’d find out soon enough.

 

Stan ordered vichyssoise and a salad of gorgonzola, chopped walnuts, and endive, drizzled with olive oil and lemon. Kyle ordered nothing, and his mother reprimanded him: “Don’t be a drama queen, Kyle. You have to eat.”

 

Kyle sighed. “It’s pointless. I’m not hungry.”

 

“Even some crusts of bread?” Sheila picked up an ovular slice of baguette and put it on Kyle’s plate; next she smeared a fold of butter on top of it. “See, it’s not so bad.”

 

Kyle looked at the dismal thing on his plate, and then at his mother, and then he shrugged. “Yeah, maybe,” he agreed.

 

“You have to eat, boyfriend,” Stan agreed. He was already on his second piece of bread. “You always wake up with low blood sugar when you don’t eat.”

 

“I’ll think about it.”

 

“Okay.” Stan patted him on the leg. “That’ll do.”

 

This was when Randy came in, looking haggard and frankly, very old. “What is it?” he asked, before even sitting down. “Stan, I go up to get some work done for _one day_ and you get kicked out of school? Both of you? I mean, what even happened?”

 

“Well, it seems Stanley

 

 

“I was flipping through the school handbook before dinner,” Gerald said. “And it seems there is no actual prohibition against having, er, _sexual relations_ on the premises. It’s very clear what’s forbidden — drugs, smoking, drinking, playing hooky, cheating, that kind of thing. And, well, with the exception of drugs and cheating, the punishments for these offenses are low-key. Well, drinking is a suspension, but hooky and smoking both call for detention. This is good news, because I think we can make a reasonable case that as you weren’t breaking the law and technically weren’t breaking a school rule, expulsion is too harsh.

 

“That said, the school could easily argue that, _uh_ , what you both did is clearly in violation of the spirit of academic conduct. And while I don’t think it should merit expulsion, boys, I have to tell you — I really agree.”

 

“I think we all agree,” Sharon said. She was looking paler than usual. “I mean, what were you both thinking?”

 

“I guess we weren’t,” Kyle replied.

 

 

 

 

“What I have been saying for years, Kyle? That boy is _not_ your friend.”

 

“I know that! I haven’t even talked to him in years!”

 

 

 

“Are we punished?” Stan asked.

 

“Oh, sweetie,” his mother replied. “No, no. It’s not — well, I suppose it’s between Kyle and his parents but you — Stanley, we can’t punish you for … well, being a boy, I suppose. Who could punish you for that? It’s besides the point, Stanley, it’s just — well, it’s just that it’s such _bad judgment_. And there may be a punishment for that, sweetie, but.” She rubbed her eyes. “But that’s all going to be between you and the school, now.”

 

“Well, is Kyle punished?”

 

Sheila snorted. “What kind of punishment am I supposed to give an 18-year-old boy?”

 

“You could forbid us from seeing each other,” Stan suggested.

 

“Oh,” Kyle sneered. “Please, _give them ideas_.”

 

“Ugh, Kyle. Stanley. _Boys_. This isn’t _Romeo and Juliet_. We can’t keep you apart; why would we want to? We can’t do anything to you, don’t you understand? The repercussions of your actions are something we aren’t in charge of.”

 

“But we’ll try to help,” Gerald reminded them. “I maintain that the school expelling you both is really rather harsh. Let’s face it —you’re teenagers. Kids do things like this. Disciplinary action, sure — but I think tossing you out is maybe a bit discriminatory. Is it against the rules? Not really, so…”

 

“So we’ll get you back in fucking school,” Randy concluded. “Christ, this is stressful.”

 

“How is it _stressful_ , Randy? You haven’t done anything!”

 

“Oh, Christ, Sharon, I was in _traffic_ —”

 

While this was occurring, Gerald leaned across Kyle and said to Stan, “Sometimes I am absolutely amazed you turned out pretty normal.”

 

Stan groaned. “I don’t think anyone in this town would call me that.”

 

“Could you both please not talk across me?”

 

“Sorry.” Stan patted Kyle’s thigh.

 

“Ugh, _fine_ , you’re forgiven.”

 

Gerald put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

 

 

 

~

 

_from_ _Shelly Marsh <smarsh@gmail.com>_

_to_ _stanley marsh <stan.marsh@gmail.com>  
date            Fri, May 6  at 8:19 PM_

_subject_ _Re: so. er._

_mailed-by_ _gmail.com_

_well, not to be cruel or anything, but that was infernally retarded of you. (though it’s surprising you waited this long. that takes real resolve. that or as i’ve suspected for some time now kyle is truly asexual.)_

_i’m sure your life is far from over. this isn’t like bad tattoos. i shouldn’t think it’ll stalk you forever._

_it’ll be okay._

 

_frankly though kyle is probably literally pissing himself._

_i might come home two weekends from now anyway. i’ll see you next weekend at graduation. don’t really know where it’s going but all of a sudden my life seems random and uncertain. yours sounds that way too._

_solidarity bro._

 

**Tktk.**

_If licking someone’s leather boots turns you (and him) on, neither of you is making a statement subversive of macho masculinity. Parody is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this. Much campy talk is parodistic, and while that may be fun at a dinner party, if you’re out to make someone you turn off the camp._

~

 

 

 

“You were inside of me,”


End file.
